Kathryn L. Lynch

Kathryn Lynch is the Katharine Lee Bates and Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English at Wellesley College and joined the Wellesley faculty in 1983. Prior to her arrival at Wellesley, she was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lynch earned her B.A. in English and Classics from Stanford University (1973), and received her M.A. (1978) and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of Virginia.

Broadly speaking, Lynch is a medievalist. Her special teaching interests include Old and Middle English literature, Chaucer, literary dreams and visions, Arthurian romance, the relationship between the Christian and Islamic worlds as represented in medieval European literature, and Chaucer in the Renaissance. She also teaches a course on women detective novelists and on the poem Beowulf in the Writing Program. In 1996 she won the Pinanski Teaching Prize at Wellesley.

Lynch has published many articles on Chaucer, including pieces on his dream visions, his philosophical affiliations, East/West themes in his poetry, his reception in the Renaissance, and his representation of female sexuality. Her book on the dream vision genre in high medieval literature, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form, was published by Stanford University Press in 1988, and her book on Chaucer dream visions, Chaucer's Philosophical Visions, was published in 2000 by D. S. Brewer. She has also edited a collection of essays, Chaucer's Cultural Geography, published in 2002 by Routledge Press, and an edition of Chaucer's dream vision, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2007. Her essays have appeared in such scholarly journals as Comparative Literature, Review of English Studies, The Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Genre, and in a variety of essay collections. She is also the author of numerous scholarly book reviews. In 1987 and again in 2005-06, Lynch held National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for College teachers; in 1997, she held a Summer Fellowship from the NEH.

Her current project is a study of the role of food in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Kathryn Lynch resides with her family in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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Profile last updated: 11/06